Sunday, May 31, 2009

Faithful? Progressive?

Blogs that wear religion on their sleeves tend to be, like churches, full of hypocrisy. I've already blogged on the Methodist preacher who, the nun who, and my latest find is Faithful Progressive, the title of which, after a little following, prompts the headline question.

The answer is "neither."

The blogger presents himself as theologically a liberal Protestant and politically as loosely left-of-center. The blogger claims to be "faithful" to Christianity and "progressive" aka "afraid to call myself socialist" but really willing to fly the flag of moral indignation.

In roughly a month or so of following the blog, FP has managed to:

-- pick the mote in the Catholic eye as regards the Nazis (without, of course, having anything new to say), while refusing to even look at the Protestant beam: the churches that allowed themselves to be merged by the Nazis into the Reich Church under Reich bishop Ludwig Muller;

-- flagrantly repeat and proudly use the schoolyard bully term "Ditchkins" (a conflation of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) as the moniker for atheists of whom the writer is obvious afraid an in awe of; and

-- flaunt the blogger's vision of the language of Cervantes as a wetback language not deserving proper use by obviously translating "Congratulations Judge Sonia Sotomayor" through a computer translator, with the result "Congratulations have judged Sonia Sotomayor," which doesn't make sense in Spanish, any more than it does in English.

When I pointed out the incredibly stupid error -- clearly the machine interpreted "judge" to be a verb ("juzgan"), not a noun ("juez") -- the blogger changed it and pretended to have intended a "pun."

The blogger, who is apparently obviously angry at afraid of atheist critics, insists the originator of "Ditchkins" has written a "great read."

On the Nazi point, he pretended not to even hear the criticism.

And to my pointing that his blog, which has far too many quotes from other sources and exceedingly little original material, violated the Associated Press' copyright, he replies that "You[r] toady sucking up to the AP is also reflective of the tendency of the new atheists to be a reactionary cultural force."

So, there it is: faithful to Christian charity? No. Progressive? Only in the weasel sense.
 The guy doesn't have a clue.

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